The Beginning

The house is structurally great. The “bones” are good, but my grandparents had not done much in terms of updating since they had moved in 50 years ago.

Both my grandparents grew up in the Depression Era, so they saved EVERYTHING. The downstairs was full but tidy, but the upstairs overflowing and overwhelming. So our first job was cleaning it out. I enjoyed it because it was a job where I could see immediate progress. The girls LOVED it because they got to throw stuff over the bannister to the first floor landing. What kid wouldn’t love crashing stuff down a flight of stairs?

Here are some of the before pictures. Each bedroom is painted a different color, so we refer to them as their color.

That is the top of the landing for the stairs. Yes, that is duct tape on the windows. We haven’t tackled that yet.
This is the blue room. It was the least cluttered and easiest to walk through. Each bedroom also has a large, walk-in closet. The girls will now have plenty of room for their clothes.
This is the closet to the blue room. Morgan will be in this room. She already knows how she wants her closet and it was exactly how I would have arranged it.
The pink room was the worst of all of them. It was jam packed with basically no room to walk through it. I remember riding that horse in my parent’s house. And the baby doll crib was mine that you see in the background.
The pink room’s closet is huge. I thought Morgan would pick it based on the closet, but this room had a hole in the ceiling and she thought she was going to have to live with that, so Natalie gets the big closet! (The hole has been fixed.)
The green room was a little cleared out by the time I got a picture, but it wasn’t terrible.

We knocked a lot out in one weekend with the upstairs. It was pretty easy to toss most of it. The pink room was the worst but really the easiest to clean out because all those boxes you saw in the pictures were empty. They had kept every appliance, gift, or random box they had ever gotten. We would always joke that Grandma always wanted us to keep the box and bows off presents. Now we know where they all ended up. The pink room.

On the next few trips up the girls asked if they were going to be throwing boxes. We found a few more things they could toss down the stairs and over the banister, but it’s pretty much all cleared out. Those pictures are coming…